AUG 23 — My late parents were both teachers. My father was the headmaster of a school in Perak for 26 years.
My mum and family moved to Penang when I was five years old and she taught in a Penang school until her retirement. My dad continued to head the school in Perak and he had an Austin car he drove back home every weekend to be with us.
We moved to Penang mainly because my parents thought the children — there were three of us , I am the youngest — would get a better education and hence better job prospects later on.
I can still remember in the 60s, when I was in a primary school, there would be a few students of my mother’s – supposedly the weaker ones who could not understand her lessons well – coming to our house in the afternoon and my mother would give them extra lessons to make sure they understood what she had taught in school, free of charge.
That was the dedication of the teachers then… they treated the students as part of their own responsibilities, and many teachers did give extra lessons voluntarily without thinking of monetary rewards. For that, sometimes they would be rewarded with gifts like durians, chickens, etc brought to the house by the students’ parents.
Such was the respect the teaching profession commanded then. Teachers, though not rich, were well-respected members of the community. This respect , however, was earned because of their selfless dedication to their profession. Teaching, my parents used to tell me, is not for everyone, but only for those who treat the profession as a calling, not a career.
My dad , a university graduate from China, was also well-schooled in the Confucianist tradition. One of the things he told us children was the Confucian teaching that “within the Four Seas, everyone else is a brother”. We were told to treat everyone equal, respect other people’s culture and religions.
The teaching profession is one of the noblest professions. Students entering schools are like white sheets of papers. Whether these papers turn out to be important documents, or textbooks, or comic books, or waste paper, or become totally black and dirty, depends a lot on the teachers. Teachers are said to be the engineers of our souls; they mould our thinking, they determine to a large extent what we would eventually turn out to be.
In the old days, even though there were a few teachers who smoked or gambled or were racists in their thinking, they would never exhibit this bad behaviour in front of their students. Even though they were black and dirty, they would still try to keep the white sheets as clean as possible, and try not to rub their dirt onto their students.
Teachers nowadays are very different from those four or five decades ago. There are still many dedicated ones who regard teaching as a calling, but many others have become very materialistic and treat teaching as just another job.
Many despite being trained in teachers’ colleges, have not understood the meaning of teaching, and they have no qualms passing their own dirt to their students, thereby making the white sheets black and dirty like they themselves.
To them, teaching is just another job, and they could not care less how their students turn out, as long as they get their salary, which is now many times better than their counterparts’ many decades ago.
The recent incident in which a principal made racist comments about her students shows the ugly side of some of these people, who have no qualms at all hurting and insulting these young minds.
While a true human being should always practise the axiom “respect your own elders and also the elders of others; love your own children and extend the same love to the children of others”, this group of racist teachers not only would not love the young children of other people, they would even go all out to hurt their feelings.
They try not only to rub their own dirt onto these white sheets, but also create holes to render such sheets into rubbish. By doing so, they have not only disgraced themselves, but the schools and the whole education system as well.
While there are many calls asking that stern action be taken against this principal, and I think the calls are justified, we should go one step further and ask ourselves why are there such teachers in our schools.
The answer is simple. It is the system. The whole system is wrong. The system influences the minds of these teachers. The system in turn is moulded by the policies. The policies are wrong. The policies that have been in place for more than half century have resulted in a milieu in which everything is defined and determined by the colour of our skin. These policies have also divided the country; divided the people. These policies have also resulted in mediocrity and loss of excellence in almost everything we do.
Without the majority race recognising this and taking steps to correct these policies, the country will go further down the path of polarisation. But to change the views and thinking of the majority race, political will power must be there. So far, it is lacking. The present PM may have realised this, but even if his mind is willing, he may not have the clout to realise his ideas of a fairer society.
August 23, 2010